Plan -- Sleep 12+ hours. Wake at noon or later. From noon, immediately head to office.

1PM - 6PM:
*Movie video from iPhone to Toshiba for charity and talk yesterday.
*Look at writing plan; move it forwards.
*Add all contacts on sheet from Mongolia to address book.
*Skim email.

6PM - 9PM: All active clients into Trello.

Onwards -- Client calls.

Day 58 --

Awake: 2:30PM (14 hours sleep)

3:30PM: Made a mistake -- had my email left open in my browser window, saw one I really wanted to click and read, did so, that set off a storm of email, then distraction… so didn't jump onto most valuable tasks right away.

12:40AM: Spend a few hours reading about Zen, particularly Rinzai. I wonder if it'd be possible to put contacts into Outlook in a mindful way.

4:30AM: I was able to work mindfully for a while, which was satisfying afterwards. Spent the rest of the night reading. Sleeping now.

At some point, the mix of travel, tons of work, etc., meant exhaustion set in and I lost 3-4 days to it. I slept 14+ hours a couple days; one day I was only awake about 10 hours before going back to sleep.

Exhaustion does funny things to your mind. I was accomplishing a heck of a lot -- speaking, working on projects, getting deals finished. Also built out two tech systems that are very useful -- one using Trello for clients to follow their projects which has been hugely helpful for moving things forwards (I'll probably write about it later), and second, I finally got around to building a contact database with tagging and actions on it -- so I've started putting everyone I know into a tagged and sorted database.

It's huge, that's been on my things to do list for years now. It was meeting a German woman running a bakery in Ulaanbaatar who was big into it that finally gave me the last push to it. Huge gains.

It's funny, though. Exhaustion does terrible things to your mind. I was accomplishing relatively decent stuff outside of the 3-4 days I was resting, but I felt pretty anxious and pretty bad.

Not so long ago, I resolved to stop trusting my emotions... they're too unreliable as an entrepreneur, where you're going through highs and lows. You're trying to meet people, put deals together. Something unexpectedly breaks through; you get ecstatic. Someone you work with does something really boneheaded and destroys a month of planning and thousands of dollars of opportunity (and they should know better!) -- you get furious. You work like crazy, exhaustion sets in, nothing feels good. Or you go on an inventive run and feel euphoric and unstoppable.

I'm trying to train myself to acknowledge the emotions -- there's something valuable there -- but not to trust them.

The reliable, good guy you know who just screwed up? It's not the end of the world, and shouldn't be overreacted to.

We got the deal, we executed on it, the Director is thrilled, and wants to introduce us to the billionaire owner of the conglomerate? Well, don't get too excited or giddy. (That happened this week too.)

Got a meeting with an office of the State Department? Okay. Keep working. The guy from the Foundation is leaving town and you won't get to meet him? No problem. My business partner and buddy almost had a chance to meet Jack Weatherford in Mongolia (he wrote "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World"; he was awarded The Order of the Polar Star, the highest award for foreign citizens from the Mongolian government). He was very excited.

It didn't happen. Then he was really disappointed.

Emotions? Useful but not trustworthy if your life has too many swings on them. I've been trying to pay attention to some fields that lead to emotional control -- Rinzai Zen Buddhism, reading philosophy, staying mindful.